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    Teaming to Innovate
    Teaming to Innovate
    Teaming to Innovate
    Ebook116 pages2 hours

    Teaming to Innovate

    By Amy C. Edmondson

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    About this ebook

    Innovation requires teaming.  (Put another way, teaming is to innovation what assembly lines are to car production.) This book brings together key insights on teaming, as they pertain to innovation. How do you build a culture of innovation? What does that culture look like? How does it evolve and grow? How are teams most effectively created and then nurtured in this context? What is a leader's role in this culture? This little book is a roadmap for teaming to innovate. We describe five necessary steps along that road: Aim High, Team Up, Fail Well, Learn Fast, and Repeat. This path is not smooth. To illustrate each critical step, we look at real-life scenarios that show how teaming to innovate provides the spark that can fertilize creativity, clarify goals, and redefine the meaning of leadership.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWiley
    Release dateSep 5, 2013
    ISBN9781118788431
    Author

    Amy C. Edmondson

    Amy C. Edmondson is the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at the Harvard Business School, renowned for her research on psychological safety over twenty years. Her award-winning work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, Psychology Today, Fast Company, Harvard Business Review, and more. Named by Thinkers50 in 2021 as the #1 Management Thinker in the world, Edmondson’s Ted Talk “How to Turn a Group of Strangers into a Team” has been viewed over three million times. She received her PhD, AM, and AB from Harvard University. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and is the author of Right Kind of Wrong, The Fearless Organization, and Teaming.

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      Book preview

      Teaming to Innovate - Amy C. Edmondson

      Introduction

      Wherever you work, it is likely that intense competition, rampant unpredictability, and demanding customers are fueling a demand for innovation. But simply calling for innovation isn’t enough to produce it.

      What It Takes to Innovate

      The ability to develop creative, viable, new products or services that solve a problem or serve a need, and do so profitably, requires: teamwork, an organizational culture that embraces paradox, and an unusual leadership mind-set.

      Teamwork

      Innovation thrives when people from different disciplines and backgrounds come together to develop new possibilities that none of them could have envisioned alone. Making this happen requires that diverse individuals work exceedingly well together. Rather than just bringing their expertise, ideas, and biases to a project and tossing them into the mix, groups that end up innovating effectively find ways to roll up their sleeves and work together. They find ways to genuinely integrate their different perspectives so as to create brand-new possibilities. This is teaming.

      Why call it teaming, rather than simply the creation of an effective team? Because innovation is a fluid process and follows an uncertain course. This means that it is not always possible to know in advance exactly what skills you’ll need on a team or how long you’ll need them, making it difficult to plan and build a stable, well-designed team before the job gets under way.

      In a typical hospital emergency room, for example, patient outcomes depend upon seamless coordination and superb communication among diverse clinicians who may not even know each other’s names at the outset of the encounter. That’s teaming. High-quality teaming blends getting to know people quickly—their knowledge, skills, and goals—with listening to other points of view, coordinating actions, and making shared decisions.

      Effective teaming happens when everyone remains highly aware of others’ needs, roles, and perspectives. This entails learning to relate to people who are different and learning to integrate different perspectives into new, shared possibilities, plans, and actions. Doing this well requires both affective (feeling) and cognitive (thinking) skills. It also requires leadership (more on this below). When it’s done well, teaming for innovation leads to new processes, products, and services that make the organization more valuable and those it serves better off.¹

      The core message of this book is that today’s business leaders need to understand and nurture this process of teaming for innovation to ensure the future success of the enterprise.

      A Culture of Paradox

      Innovative organizations tend to have cultures that embrace paradox. This is because innovation depends upon the coexistence of pairs of seeming opposites: play and discipline; high standards and a tolerance for failure; the use of deep experts and boundary-spanning generalists who deeply empathize with customers.

      Playful chaos and focused discipline. Organizations that innovate, whether to invent a new business model, come up with a new product, or improve a process, know how to focus on an important problem. At the same time, innovation is an all-too-human process—inherently unpredictable and often chaotic. If you want to innovate, any idea has to be welcome, at least early on before ideas are winnowed down. But welcoming all ideas, wacky ones included, creates a sense of chaos.

      The key is asking good questions—and not knowing the answer in advance! Franck Riboud is CEO of Groupe Danone, a creative and purposeful consumer goods company (best known for its yogurt) that has reinvented itself many times throughout its 94-year history. He welcomes the chaos of not knowing in advance what employees will come up with. In an interview for a Harvard Business School case study, he said:

      It’s like a Lego box that you buy for your children. They start to play, trying to find a way to build the image on the Lego box. At the end of the day, they give up, throw out the box, and put the pieces away. The next weekend you put all the Lego pieces on the floor and then they try to imagine something. Not what was on the box, but what they have in their heads.²

      To Riboud, strategy happens when employees come up with something new, not when they follow the instruction manual.

      Known for its success in product development, IDEO, the design firm, has received media attention for its freewheeling idea-generation, a process which gradually narrows in on compelling solutions for customers. The company deviates dramatically from the cubicle culture dominating modern workplaces, where people’s tasks are highly constrained. IDEO exudes playfulness, complete with a tech box full of odd objects for triggering associations, patterns, and ideas. The firm deliberately hires across an array of disciplines—putting people of differing backgrounds, who look at situations from varying angles, together in project teams.³

      IDEO’s approach to product innovation emphasizes collaboration in multidisciplinary teams, fresh thinking, and empathic devotion to user needs. But it also involves a disciplined process. For all the exploration and experimentation, each stage of this process has deliverables, and a concrete, results-oriented mentality is at work.

      Deep experts and broad thinkers. Innovation happens when diverse experts (in a specific topic, subject area, or clinical specialty, for instance) and broad, general thinkers come together. The generalists keep their eye on the ball, on the goal—something that has usually never been done before. Without them, the specialists can get mired in the past, convinced of what has previously been possible, or impossible. But the generalists lack the depth and practicality of the specialists’ experience (technical, procedural, even emotional).

      Lake Nona Medical City is a 7,000-acre residential and research cluster in Central Florida.⁴ The idea for this living laboratory was spearheaded by Tavistock Group, a private investment organization. The project aimed to develop an innovation cluster, complete with a master planned community, focused on biomedical research, clinical care, and medical education in a healthy, eco-friendly environment. Tavistock founded Lake Nona Property Holdings to develop the community and the nonprofit Lake Nona Institute to support the mission. By 2012, a diverse group of partners had moved onto plots of land at the development.

      To realize the community’s ambitious goals, Thad Seymour, president of the Lake Nona Institute, knew that he would have to work effectively with a growing roster of partners across sectors and industries. Rather than hiring traditional developers, Tavistock’s leaders staffed Lake Nona Property Holdings and the Lake Nona Institute with executives from a variety of backgrounds, each bringing an area of expertise that reflected one or more of four pillars: sustainability, technology, health and wellness, and education.

      The success of the project was summarized in a speech by City of Orlando mayor Buddy Dyer in February 2012:

      Realizing that we would not be able to compete for companies and jobs of the future unless we redefined the way our entire region worked together, this community committed itself to a level of cooperation never before seen in Central Florida. In fostering the partnership necessary to create the Medical City, we didn’t just build a one-time project. We also created a road map for how to get big, important things done and how to overcome the challenges that confront our community.⁵

      Many in the Lake Nona project pointed to the role of the institute’s culture in

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